Don Quixote tilting against windmills on the long-suffering Rosinante,
trying to save damsels in distress from imaginary ogres; or me jousting
with an exclusive environment on my battered wheelchair to try and give
people with disabilities a fighting chance. Who is crazier?

Saturday, 29 November 2014

One sure sign of the bully is that he grabs the lion's share of what's on offer, and expects the `lesser members' of his fold to lump it and live with it; e.g.

a staggering majority of the world's wealth/resources is in the hands of a ridiculously small minority;

a majority of a state's budgetary allocation for its transport facilities is spent on taking more and more space for making more and more, wier and wider, roads, with the prime beneficiaries being drivers of private automobiles;

the larger cities, like Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Bengaluru usurp the right to consume unreasonably and disproportionately large percentages of power/water and such essential commodities today, leaving essentially nothing for the rest of their state (Maharashtra, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, in the cases at hand);

at a national level, decisions are made at capitals on matters affecting all citizens of the country, by having meetings of `stakeholders' who are invariably limited to one recurring cast of characters living in the capital, thereby making a mockery of the democratic process.

I am particularly distressed by one manifestation of the last example above. Readers of this blog do not need to be reminded about the history of the passage of the contentious RPD Bill of 2014. In the initial weeks of this year, some so-called `leading representatives' of the disability movement in the country, mostly from Delhi, in an unholy nexus with the `netas' of a floundering Congress party, tried to hastily push through this RPD Bill. It was a feather in the cap of the bullied poor relatives from outside the capital, that they perceived and highlighted the numerous flaws in this wannabe-bill, and got parliament to send this to a Standing Committee, so that it could currently be kept in cold storage till it could be reviewed properly after the new government had been voted in. Barely a month ago, opinions were sought from the public regarding the merits/de-merits of this Bill. Several people sent in well-documented and argued petitions to the SJ&E Ministry. After this farce of a democratic exercise, we read a recent gleeful boast in Facebook by one of the proponents of this Bill (from long before the time of the aborted attempt early in the year) that the Parliamentary Standing Committee will be holding its meetings to discuss the RPD Bill was set to meet on Dec. 2nd, and hopes to have the new law in place by January 2015! This farce of a democratic process needs to be exposed for its Delhi-centric and nationally unrepresentative way of passing ridiculously framed laws.

One would think that if a law was once attempted, in vain, to be pushed through, and if it came up for review, the people consulted would include some of the people who pointed out the shortcomings of the earlier failed version, and an attempt made to see

what the reasons were for its not having been passed earlier; and

what remedial measures have been adopted in the new draft to address the flaws perceived earlier.

When will we stop going back to the same bullies again and again, ad nauseum?

people park their cars and motorcycles on pavements, blithely impervious to the inconvenience this causes by blocking the only possibly safe space for people to walk, disabled people to use their wheelchairs, blind people trying to navigate a safe distance from the ubiquitous automobiles?

or even worse, when the roads are full of cars stalled in a traffic jam, motorcycles start zooming on the pavements - assuming pavements exist and are even, with cutaways to easily get on to and off from the pavement?

it is not feasible to keep tactile tiles on pavements, since miscreants remove such tiles and take them away for god knows what use their perverted minds wish to put them to?

groups of disability activists have to periodically make access audits prior to making fervent pleas to all and sundry to refrain from such inconsiderate practices that are constantly infringing on and depriving them of their rights to lead their lives independently, and with dignity?

people of all ages periodically throw plastic bags on the road after their contents have been used/consumed?

men unzip their flies and `let fly' in random public places?

close to half the population do not have access to toilets at home, and defecate out in the open - often on the banks of water bodies (even the supposedly sacred Ganges, Brahmaputra and Cauvery are not exempt from such pollution)? and people of `high castes' insist on doing so and forcing people of `low castes' to scrape this s..t off the ground and carry basket loads of such `night-soil', as it is euphemistically called, to dump it god knows where?

Whenever there are blocks in the sewage system, people of the same Dalit classes are `employed' to get into the sewers without any protection of any sort to unclog the mess,; not week goes by without your reading in the papers that two or three such `cleaners' lost their lives due to having inhaled noxious fumes when they went down into the drains, AND that this inhuman practice of people diving into the s..t had been declared illegal some n years ago.

Yet, all these unholy practices continue unabated in my land with its fabled culture of several millennia! If this is civilisation, please give me the era of the caveman!

Sunday, 23 November 2014

Would you rather live in Kochi or Delhi? Cambridge or Birmingham? Los Angeles or Boston? Tokyo or Kyoto?

What is the common feature of each of the `winning cities' to the last question?

If land is constantly acquired for broadening roads for `easier commutes' for cars, what do you do when the whole nation has only roads and no more land?

If the only way to get from anywhere to anywhere (even just crossing the street like the proverbial chicken) is to get into a car and drive some three or four kilometres, what do you do when Mother Earth has been sucked dry of all her oil reserves by the increasing need of the SUVs and motor cars?

Have you seen the movie Mad Max?

How does a mother take her children to play in a green when all the green has become tar or concrete?

If the worship of wide roads even leads to motor cycles using the pavements (should they exist), where does one walk, or use a wheelchair, if one cannot do without such aids?

(This post is a response to the following depressing news of an endeavour begun by the same city corporation which has been periodically giving us tidbits in the newspapers about `reclaiming our open spaces' and `introduction of jogging and cycling tracks'.)

Saturday, 1 November 2014

World Disabulity Day is apparently `observed' on December 3rd every year. This `observation' can be done in one of at least two ways:

(i) you could reserve one particular date on the calendar on which date, every year, you announce to the world that `some of your best friends are freaks' and on which date you will tell the whole world that everybody must be kind to freaks and strive to fill the world with `freak lovers'; or

(ii) you could tell yourself (and the world) that it is idotic to define some specific way somebody is different as `freakishness', realise that everybody is a `freak' in some way, and that the intelligent way to make the world a better place to live in is to revel in the existence of differences between us, and to strive for the ideal of `universal design' whose inclusive nature made no concessions for a design which singles out certain `freaks' for not being able to use that which has been designed in an inconsiderate and unthinking manner. (For instance, having a restaurant which can only be reached by climbing a flight of `only three' steps from road-level is a perfact instance of exclusive design which disallows clients who need to use a wheelchair.)

And there was this e-discussion between some people in my group (calling itself the DRA - short for Disability Rights Alliance) on how to utilise the forthcoming `World Disability Day' to clarify the distinction between the two perceptions/attitudes in (i) and (ii) above, when the following brilliant suggesstion came up: `gherao vehicles parked in such a way as to render pavements inaccessible'. (The freaky non-Indian reader of this piece should seek a `normal' Indian's aid in understanding what `gherao' means.)

(Thanks are due to my former student Madhushree for capturing the essence of my glee at the prospect in this cartoon she whipped up in a couple of days.)

This suggestion was just after my heart. Fortunately, enough members of DRA were happy with the idea of doing `something' about accessible pavements. In addition to several wheelchairs parked - preferably with occupants - encircling a motorcycle or car parked across a pavement, I have fond hopes of executing one of my pet dreams (born in a freaky disabled mathemtician's mind, naturally) of parking my wheelchair right in the way of people trying to access a flight of steps - leading to a store or the ATM of some bank or any commercial place, with a `simple mathematical problem' (which would be totally incomprehensible to one without some mathematical training, but would be as simple for me as climbing those three steps would be for them) which people would have to solve before I would move my wheelchair out of their way, and pointing out that freaks ill-equipped to solve the problem unfortunately had no place in my world.

I await December 3rd with ghoulish desire - to see people's reaction to this world with roles reversed.

About Me

I am a professor of mathematics at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai (India). I have been increasingly mobility challenged of late due to the onset of a neurological condition known as multiple sclerosis; and perforce, I have had to notice the different ways that society excludes people like me, not deliberately, but for want of consciously thinking of the need for a more inclusive and accessible society.
Most of the posts here are a reproduction of articles from a column called `Different Strokes for Different Folks' which I wrote in the Times of India for a little more than a year from August 2011 until the powers that be decided that there were more pressing matters to be discussed on their pages.
I've written a bit more in the post 'Genesis of the Blog', which explains how this blog came into being.